Thailand’s prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, has told the nation on television 15 March that he will not give in to demands by tens of thousands of red shirt protestors that he resign today, insisting that changes must be the result of elections where voices of people other than the protestors have a chance to be heard. The protestors gathered outside the army barracks Monday where Vejjajiva had gone when a rally with an estimated (BBC numbers) 100,000 took place Sunday, but he left in a helicopter shortly after his TV appearance.
The red shirts back former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who has remained abroad following a two-year prison sentence for abuse of power, which he and his supporters say was politically motivated.
Opposition group UDD leader Natthawut Saikua responded by saying 1,000 litres of blood will be taken from donors Tuesday and spread outside Government House to force government workers to walk across a bloody trail.
Links to other sites: Bangkok Post, BBC,
This work by genevalunch.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.
News story, GenevaLunch, 15 March 2010.
Filed under: World news
Tags: Abhisit Vejjajiva, abuse of power, Bangkok, prime minister, protestors, rally, red shirts, Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra
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March 15th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
This is sad, because these demonstrators are paid about $15 per day to participate in these rallies. They may or may not approve of all that goes on, but this sort of “blood letting” is the level at which their leadership operates. Lots of hyperbole and distortion to keep the ball rolling. If they don’t get what they want, they’ll be able to draw several day’s wages again in a couple months. This particular group is about l% of the population; their last three PMs were removed for various abuses in office; vote buying is still common and not disapproved of (though illegal) by most of the rural folk who see it as a form of patronage. Hopefully, with the current colatitian’s patient reforms things will change over time.